Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (review)

There are any number of ways in which I find myself stunned by Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line. Not only does she offer some of the finest readings of Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, and Pauline Hopkins that I have ever read; not only does she produce an examination of race in early American cinema that is, dare I say it, fun; but she also reminds us that the discursive strategies that have been utilized in this country to produce racial and sexual distinction are not simply parallel and overlapping but are oftentimes, most times, one and the same. In doing so, Somerville has taken a first tentative step toward moving us beyond the sterility that has begun to infect both queer and race theory to announce a new field of inquiry, in which scholars will be asked to move beyond the now easy task of locating hidden homoeroticism and opaque racialism and toward an understanding that there is no way one might properly treat matters of race and sexuality in isolation from one another. Somerville’s discussion of scientific racism turns, in fact, on the reality that early sexology was deeply implicated in the burgeoning eugenics movement. Her discussion of early American cinema, particularly of the film A Florida Enchantment, is an impressive critique of the manner in which the anxiety around racial and sexual mixing is relieved for white audiences by the production of a farcical “black face” Negro who stands in for the those actual Negroes recently restricted from theaters. At the same time, her readings of early-twentieth-century black American literature are extremely attentive to the manner in which black intellectuals found themselves beset by a “racial” crisis that was lived for many as a “sexual” crisis, a “queering of the color line” indeed, that involved cross-dressing, interracialism, and more than a hint of homoeroticism. Paying attention to what she calls “the inexplicable presence of things not named” Somerville is relentless in her unpacking of the manner in which the very notion of the queer was for earlier generations a marker of both the racial and the sexual outsider, “the not named thing” that could “pass” as either white or heterosexual or both. The policing of black bodies has always been an attempt to restrict “queer” sexuality, the promiscuous mingling of bodies and desire that altogether confuses the racial and sexual common sense. My only critique of Somerville, then, is that she does not go far enough. She does not—and perhaps cannot—fully explicate the implications of her challenging new work in periods earlier and later than her own. It is my sincere hope, therefore, that such work will be forthcoming from both Somerville and the many scholars who will find themselves challenged by this exciting new book.